Dignity, Not Detention: ICE Ignores Humane Alternatives

Immigration and Customs Enforcement had planned for the Varick Detention Center in downtown Manhattan to close yesterday, but detainee illnesses and a stubborn unwillingness to accept help from legal and advocacy organizations to implement detention alternatives has delayed the closure.

ICE officials have insisted on transferring Varick detainees to facilities in New Jersey, where they'll be further away from their families and subject to equally or more intolerable conditions than the mistreatment they already received at Varick. Immigrants are often subject to worse conditions in detention centers than our most violent criminals receive in prison, yet many of these people have nothing bigger than a civil administrative violation on their record. In part, this is due to the fact that ICE, unlike the Bureau of Prisons, doesn't have any regulations for detention centers -- just voluntary suggestions. Human rights: optional.

Since 2003, over 100 detainees have died in the network of prisons, which cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion to run a year. There's evidence that, in some prisons, detainees are held longer to suck money from the federal government for other uses, and that the private prison industry is a major beneficiary of immigration injustice. Yet there are viable alternatives to this inhumane and expensive system, and the closing of a detention center provides a perfect opportunity to explore those other options, especially when transfers are proving to be difficult to carry out.

It costs $253 per day to house about 300 detainees at Varick, and will still cost over a hundred dollars to detain them in various NJ facilities, but would cost a mere $14 a day to equip detainees with electronic monitoring bracelets, which would allow them to be released from imprisonment. And many of these detainees may actually be eligible for release or parole. But offers from a coalition of 16 legal and advocacy organizations, including the NY Civil Liberties Union, to help identify detainees eligible for release, parole, or detention alternatives was summarily rejected by ICE. This despite the fact that actions such as releasing ill detainees on medical parole would solve the problem of trying to relocate people who are so sick other centers won't take them.

A network of organizations and advocates across the country led by the Detention Watch Network have launched a new campaign, Dignity, Not Detention: Preserving Human Rights and Restoring Justice, to battle this continued unwillingness by immigration officials to work in the best interests of detainees' human rights -- and taxpayers' pockets.

Photo credit: amandbhslater